Dredging of PCBs on the Hudson River will finish in two years — by 2015 — rather than in three years or more as initially expected, the regional head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

"The whole project is ahead of schedule," said EPA Regional Director Judith Enck during a conference call with reporters from her New York City headquarters. "We originally thought that dredging would take three more years. We now believe it will take two more years."

Enck said more PCBs are being removed faster than expected when the project was designed. When dredging ends on Friday, nearly three-quarters of the target of 2.65 million cubic yards of PCB-tainted sediments will have been removed in four years of work on the river south of Fort Edward.

Dredging targets were widely exceeded both this year and last, with more than 1.2 million cubic yards dredged, compared to the combined targets of about 700,000 cubic yards.

"We have been picking up speed," said Enck. "I am sure that General Electric would be happy to be done sooner rather than later." She credited GE's construction of additional handling facilities at the PCB processing station at the Champlain Canal for helping speed the work.

GE is paying for the massive Superfund program pollution cleanup, which is the nation's largest. The company has said it has spent about $1 billion so far on the project, which covers about 500 acres of river bottom along 40 miles of river from Fort Edward to Troy.

With the dredging ending at least a year early, the accelerated schedule puts increasing pressure on New York to address a long-unresolved question — what to do about the PCB-tainted river navigation channel of the Champlain Canal, which was not part of the 2002 cleanup plan between EPA and GE.

"The canal is an important issue," said Enck. "That is up to the state of New York. I don't want to speak for the state ... It is something that they need to address."

She said EPA was legally barred from adding the channel dredging to the original project agreed to by EPA and GE in 2002. GE plants in Fort Edward and Hudson Falls legally dumped PCBs into the river until the practice was banned in the 1970s.

In a written statement Tuesday, GE spokesman Mark Behan said: "Both GE and EPA expect actual dredging will take two more seasons (2014, 2015) and the related, in-river work — the habitat reconstruction — will continue the third year (2016)." The day before, he told the Times Union: "We expect the remaining dredging and the work that follows — backfilling and habitat restoration — will continue for at least three more seasons."

Officials from the state Canal Corp. have been pushing unsuccessfully for nearly a decade to be added to the PCB dredging agenda while the GE-supported dredging flotilla remains in place, which will now end in 2015, rather than 2016 or beyond.

This spring, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office was negotiating with GE over the potential addition of the canal navigation channel, a measure that also was reviewed by the two previous occupants of that office, Eliot Spitzer and now-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The work is expected to cost at least $180 million, something the cash-strapped Canal Corp. could never afford on its own.

Schneiderman's office declined comment both Monday and Tuesday when asked if negotiations with GE over the canal were continuing. In the spring, GE denied such talks were happening, and Behan said on Monday that position had not changed.

The river's navigation channel has not been dredged by the canal corporation since the 1980s because of PCBs, and since has silted in so much that the channel is too shallow for most commercial shipping. The 60-mile canal runs from Whitehall, near the tip of South Bay at Lake Champlain, south to Fort Edward, where it joins the Hudson and flows along the river and through a series of six locks and dams to Waterford.

Parts of the undredged channel on the river are only 3 feet deep, while a minimum of 12 feet is needed for most commercial river traffic. Cargo shipping on the canal has plummeted from about 700,000 tons in 1980 to less than 1,000 tons annually since the mid-1990s.

This spring, the Canal Corp. said it was starting its own planning for the dredging work, and that permit applications would be filed with the state Department of Environmental Conservation. Canal Corp. spokesman Shane Mahar declined comment on the subject Monday and Tuesday.

DEC spokeswoman Lisa King said the agency has "no recent permit applications on file" from the Canal Corp. regarding the Champlain Canal.